Wednesday 27 June 2012 11.25 EDT
First published on Wednesday 27 June 2012 11.25 EDT

The Daily Mail has bad news for "right-thinking" people everywhere: Racism is "hardwired" into the human brain. Even well-meaning progressives "make unconscious decisions based on a person's race". It is inescapable.

The one small hitch in this story is adverted to in that shopworn phrase "scientists say". A discordant note should always sound in the reader's mind when a journalist opens an article with this assurance. For, in point of fact, scientists don't say.

The basis of the Mail's claim is an article published yesterday in the journal Nature, on the neuroscience of race. The article does not involve new laboratory research, but is rather a review of existing studies. These studies had used magnetic resonance imaging to show the regions of the brain implicated in the perception of race and ethnicity. The review shows that a network of brain regions, centred on the amygdala, are involved.

Nowhere in the article, or in the accompanying interview with the lead scientist Dr Elizabeth Phelps, is there any support given to the claim that racism is "hardwired" into the human brain. Noticeably, the Mail does not quote any statement in support of this claim. The sole quotations from the researchers used by the newspaper are taken from the conclusion to the review. These do support the existence of "unconscious" racial bias, of the sort which may affect important matters such as legal decisions. But they do not support the claim that racism is hardwired.

And, in fact, the drift of the research tends in the opposite direction to the conclusion reported by the Mail. If anything, the review stresses neuroplasticity, not hardwiring, and notes the cultural inputs to the production of racial bias. [A]lthough contemporary cultural norms stress equality and fairness, it explains, "the culture is also saturated with negative associations of black Americans".

Further, demonstrating the considerable variety across groups in their perceptions of race, the researchers say that it is "thought to reflect cultural and social learning of race attitudes and stereotypes". Finally, it notes the use of techniques based on this type of research to "decrease negative evaluations of outgroup members" – which suggests that, far from being hardwired, they are capable of being unlearned.

The Mail was not the only newspaper to take this line. But the question of how it got things so wrong is worth asking. One could infer that the author of the piece wasn't fully acquainted with the research. But even that would not explain why the dramatic claim of "hardwiring" was inserted into the opening sentence and headline. Is it, perhaps, unconscious bias? Do Mail journalists automatically think of hardwiring when the words "racism" and "brain" are placed in the same sentence?

The answer might be ideological. The significance of the claim that racism is "hardwired" is that hardwiring is resistant to alteration. Ordinarily, when this language is used, it refers to behaviours that evolutionary psychologists claim evolved in the Pleistocene era in response to adaptive pressures. To claim that racism is hardwired is to say that it is natural.

The major mutation of racist ideology in the decades since the collapse of the British empire has been a shift from global white supremacism to a defensive white nationalism. Instead of affirming supremacist attitudes, based on biological hierarchies, the new "race" ideology validates aversive attitudes, based on cultural difference and a hardwired preference for one's "own kind".

It universalises and naturalises racist beliefs, two primary ideological gestures. Enoch Powell was the major pathfinder for this reorientation, arguing that he saw no inherent superiority in the white "race", but believed that cultural differences were such that it was very difficult for black and white people to coexist. As they always have, the progenitors of "race" ideology constantly seek validation in the natural sciences. If science doesn't oblige, there is always the venerable technique of "making things up".

There are, then, three themes at work together here. The first is poor journalism, which is often given away when the arresting claim in the headline is given no elaboration in the article. The second is the misuse of science for ideological purposes. Science and ideology are not neatly separable, but there is a difference between interpretation and travesty. And the last is what has happened to race ideology. The idea that racism is inevitable and natural, and that multiculturalism has failed on this account, forms a persistent, low drumbeat on the right.

Stories like this appear to give substance to the windy rhetoric – but only if you take their word for it.